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He didn't notice he was screaming.
He'd surreptitiously stocked up on enough painkillers to knock out a man twice his size and even underneath all of those the pain in his augments was overwhelming, and still his whole brain was blaring with RETURN TO YOUR WORKSTATION IMMEDIATELY. RETURN TO YOUR WORKSTATION IMMEDIATELY. RETURN TO—
His only saving grace was that he was in too much pain to think, let alone move, or he would have barged out of the storage closet and run to find the pilot of the ship, insisted they turn around, return to the station, just to make the feeling stop—
He was only vaguely aware of the door opening, hands pulling him out as he thrashed, distant voices saying "dear gentle mothergods" and "what the fuck” and "a stowaway?" and "go get Captain Gurathin—" before he passed out.
He woke up in a medsys, which was a step up from being spaced, at least. (He'd heard horror stories about stowaways being immediately spaced upon discovery. He thinks that's illegal and doesn't really happen. He thinks.)
Staring at the ceiling, it took him a moment to realize that... his brain was quiet. The Employee Retention Insurance in his augments wasn't screaming at him. The pain in his head was gone. He poked at the information in his augments, and it was all gone, factory reset. He'd expected that, but he let himself grin, just a little bit. He must be out of range. He did it.
The painkillers had either worn off or his blood had been pumped out with clean replacements because his whole body felt sore, though. He tried to sit up in the medsys bed—and, ah. No, he hadn't made it, not quite yet.
A middle-aged woman was standing at the end of the bed, arms folded, glaring at him. "So the stowaway junkie finally awakens."
”Who are you?” he asked.
Her eyes narrowed. "You're on my ship. I should be asking who you are."
"It's your ship, but I have no idea who you are, either," he said. He waited for the zap and the reprimand from the ERI about addressing superiors disrespectfully. Nothing. He was out of range. He was free. (Well, partially. Almost.)
"I should just space you," the woman grumbled. "I'm Captain Sanjana Gurathin and you are not supposed to be on my ship. So, I repeat: who are you?"
He was aware enough to test the limits by being a little shit, but that's about as much energy as he could spare. He had come up with a cover story, but to the void if he could remember it now. So he just fell back against the medsys pillow and told the truth. "Michael Gutierrez."
"Doesn't answer shit," Captain Gurathin said. "Why are you on my ship, doped up to your eyeballs? You would've overdosed on the floor if Yazzie hadn't dragged you to the medsys. But if you're just some junkie, you couldn't have made it on without any of us noticing."
"'m not a junkie," Michael said.
"Not an answer either. What are you, then? What was attacking you so bad that you were screaming and flailing in my maintenance closet?"
"My augments went haywire," he said. Not a lie. Not the truth, exactly, but close enough. He's gotten good at that. "Painkillers were to stop it."
"There's nothing on your augments, the medsys said—" Something clicked in her expression, and she looked instinctively to the far wall, as if she could see anything beyond it. "You're a contract-breaker runaway."
There was no point in denying it. "Yes."
"How many years left on your contract?"
"Eleven."
"Shit," the Captain said. "And they put something in your augments so you can't leave before time's up?”
”Yes.”
"I've heard of companies pulling that on their workers," she said. "I didn't think... blessings of the mothergods. That looked nightmarish."
"Felt worse than it looked," Michael said.
"Oh, you're the kind that thinks you're funny. Even better. Shit." The captain ran a hand through her hair, fidgety now. "You realize this makes you stolen goods and me a smuggler."
"Sorry."
"No you're not."
"True."
The captain let out a long sigh. "What I should do it spin right around the moment we exit the wormhole and drop you right back on the station you came from."
The sudden cold pit that formed in Michael's stomach was immediately disrupted by a voice yelling down the hall, "Can't do that! We'll miss our pickup window at Lockade Station and they get piiiiiiiiissed if you do that!"
"... but as my lovely pilot Harjo who is supposed to be flying the ship and not eavesdropping points out, we can't do that because we'll miss our pickup window at Lockade Station," the captain continued. "I could just turn you over to Port Authority on Lockade and let them deal with you..." At the expression on his face, her teeth set, and she said, more quietly, "How bad is it? What you're running away from?"
His instinct was to reassure her that he was gainfully employed and had no complaints to avoid the ERI’s admonishment, but he hadn't been able to complain about his company in nine years. It was... dizzying, refreshing, to be able to say and not just think, "Bad. It was bad."
Captain Gurathin looked at him for a long moment, and sighed. "Look. I don't know your story, and the less I know, the better. Lord Krishna knows I know too much already. But we're on a trade circuit that brings us out to a lot of freeholds. There's one three stops from here where we pick up textiles that's about as far out as we go. The food is boring but it's free even for offworlders, and the paperwork is always interminable because their systems aren't integrated with any of the corporate ones, so I can drop you there and you can get a running start to wherever you want to go next. In between, if anyone asks, you can be my dumbass nephew who got fired from your planetside job so you're tagging along with me for this circuit, and that's why you don't know anything." She waved her finger at him. "This isn't some ballad, mind you, I'm not adopting you into the crew. But I'll take you as far as Preservation. That enough?"
"More than enough," said Michael Gutierrez—Michael Gurathin, now, to anyone who asked.
When they drop out of the wormhole, he can feel it.
It's been thirteen years, and he's almost forgotten what it feels like to have the ERI in his brain activate. It jumps right back in, overriding everything he's stored in his augments since, awake like an old enemy he thought was dead.
RETURN TO YOUR WORKSTATION IMMEDIATELY his brain blares, with a shock of pain that makes him double over.
(Almost forgotten.)
His captors notice, at least, and send the override codes that VantageIT must have given them to temporarily halt the ERI's punishment. They leave him gasping, with his hands on his knees.
"Good to be home, Consultant Gutierrez?" one of them asks.
Asshole, Gurathin thinks, but when he tries to say so he gets an admonishment against disrespectful speech and another painful zap.
He hasn't been Michael Gutierrez for thirteen years. Hasn't heard the name since the last time it left his own mouth on his way out of this system.
The first real coil of fear starts to settle in his stomach. He's not Dr. Gurathin here. Never was. That doesn't matter to them. Here, he's Consultant Gutierrez, employee number 409234 (it's awful how quickly the number springs back into his mind, dormant like the ERI), and he's never been and never will be anything else.